Expanded Wound Care Clinic Ready For Public

Specialty unit at UPMC McKeesport expects to serve twice as many patients

By Jason Togyer
The Tube City Almanac
August 15, 2024
Posted in: McKeesport and Region News

UPMC McKeesport is celebrating the grand opening of a new, state-of-the-art wound-care clinic in the Mansfield Building. The facility is double the size of the previous location in the Painter Building. (Submitted photo courtesy UPMC.)

UPMC McKeesport has doubled the size of its wound-care clinic and expects to be able to treat about twice as many patients with slow-to-heal injuries — including bone infections and people suffering complications from diabetes and poor circulation — than ever before.

The new clinic, located on the sixth floor of the hospital’s Mansfield Building, will hold an open house from 4 to 6 p.m. today (Aug. 15) to explain the facilities to visitors and offer free health screenings.

The first 50 attendees receive a free gift. Foot-health checks will be offered, along with cholesterol and glucose screenings, as well as tours of the clinic’s treatment areas.

“This has been a consistently growing program and a consistently growing clinic for us, but there are always opportunities for us to build greater awareness within the community,” said Joseph Vermilya, senior director of operations for UPMC McKeesport and UPMC East.

“As we continue to offer more and more outpatient services through the hospital campus we want to give folks who live in the nearby area an opportunity to come in, see the new space, and see what exactly is offered,” Vermilya said.

In addition to improved patient care, the new wound-care clinic — which includes a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine — is expected to offer additional training for physicians and access to advanced research being conducted by Pitt and UPMC.

“They are going to be able to physically be located inside of this new clinic,” Vermilya said. “Somebody may come in for a pressure ulcer, or to be treated for diabetic neuropathy, and we can refer them over to that team that is physically located now inside of our suite to be able to discuss if they would be a potential applicant or a potential enrollee for a variety of different studies that they're doing.”

The Mansfield clinic replaces an older facility launched 14 years ago in the basement of the hospital’s Painter Building with four beds and two hyperbaric oxygen chambers.

The basement location may have been ironically appropriate. Dr. Marc Cordero, vice president of medical affairs for UPMC McKeesport and vice chair of surgery for UPMC East and UPMC McKeesport, said that for many years, wound care was treated as “healthcare’s dirty little secret.”

A generation ago, Cordero said, few doctors specialized in caring for pressure sores, slow-healing wounds, deep-tissue wounds and bone infections. “If you had a wound, you would kind of bounce around from doc to doc, or maybe a home healthcare nurse would tell your PCP what to do, and you’d hope for the best,” Cordero said.

As a result, patients would develop more serious illnesses — sometimes losing a limb, or even their lives.

UPMC McKeesport’s new wound-care clinic will include space for researchers from the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a medical research institute which is a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC. (Submitted photo courtesy UPMC.)

Cordero, a native of the area, was working as a general surgeon at Mon Valley Hospital and had developed a practice that specialized in treating wounds when he was approached by former UPMC McKeesport Vice President of Operations Merle Taylor to open a clinic at the hospital.

The clinic now treats 4,500 to 5,000 patients per year. UPMC McKeesport expects that number to double in the new facility.

Patients span the gamut from younger people with diabetes and other conditions to older people who may have developed pressure sores, Cordero said. 

The hyperbaric chambers — in which a person’s body is kept in an atmosphere of 100 percent oxygen to speed tissue healing — are regularly used by patients who are experiencing side effects from radiation therapy for cancer, or who are suffering from osteomyelitis, an infection in the bones that can result from a traumatic injury, frequent medication injections or some surgical procedures.

“Unfortunately, with substance abuse, a lot of intravenous drug use results in skin issues, and we wind up seeing those patients at a younger age,” Cordero said. “But really, we can treat anyone with wounds from a variety of traumatic issues, including follow-ups from urgent care and emergency room admissions ... it is a very busy clinic.”

Although the clinic does sometimes have walk-in visitors, for all practical purposes 100 percent of patients are referred by other doctors, he said. All services are provided on an outpatient basis.

Funding for the new facility was provided by UPMC as well as the McKeesport Hospital Foundation. The exact cost of the improvements in the Mansfield Building was not immediately available.

Cordero said UPMC McKeesport has worked to try to make sure that Mon-Yough area doctors are aware of the wound-care services provided at the hospital, but hopes that healthcare providers as well as the general public will learn more about the clinic at today’s event.

“One thing I will add is that all of our employees and most of our medical staff are all local to the greater McKeesport area,” Cordero said. “So we’re kind of all hometown folks taking care of hometown people, myself included. Having grown up here, I know McKeesport people like to be taken care of by McKeesport people.”

Jason Togyer is volunteer executive director of Tube City Community Media Inc. and editor of Tube City Almanac.

Originally published August 15, 2024.

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